I've been missing some good stuff at Yahoo!

Some random bits scribbled by Jeremy Zawodny

Now that I'm at Yahoo!, I'm starting to realize just how many different services they offer. Case in point, Yahoo!'s podcast
directory and search. Try this search, for example. Tim Mayer and Jeremy have been doing a once-a-month podcast where they talk to different interesting people in the internet industry. Now that Jeremy has gone to Google and I've come to Yahoo!, maybe Tim and I will do the podcast together? We'll figure it out.

Another feature I've been enjoying is Yahoo! Answers. When you want to find out more about something like playing around with your TiVo, it's a great place to look. Highly recommended. :)

Another good feature that I think most people miss is the ability to choose which story types appear on yahoo news. There is a microscopic "Add/Remove News Categories" link. I looked at the news home page every day for almost a year before I noticed it.

I think one great yahoo service people dont know about is travel. Do you know that Yahoo travel is the only site that shows prices based on specific dates... man, so few people know about this service that I am appaled by the lousy job that Yahoo does to promote it.

Neal - there are other travel related sites that offer the same (and indeed far enhanced functionalities).

The shame is that Yahoo (given its reach) does not have a truly international travel product that is of significant use to frequent travelers (corporate and leisure).

Their product is regarded as a joke in Europe.

For example, I want to go to Cape Town from the west coast - the cheapest way to do it is a couple of return tickets (e.g one to LHR from LAX) and then a cheap return from there to CPT). But this functionality is not offered even though IATA would permit such a sale. This means that we USA customers are ripped off.

I wonder sometimes whether the people running the travel show have ever been "proper" travelers or whether they just think that published fares are the way to go?

Now that you are a Yahoo maybe you'll get that Newsweek Cover like Caterina Fake or a shot at Bill O'Reilly like Danah Boyd or even a .... ValleyWag spot like Jeremy. I'm seeing you as ... Chris or maybe ... Taylor Hicks.

#1: I love the narcisism when posting comments.
#2: Why do you not have a place where I can directly contact you?
#3: Here goes.. As you're the only yahoo blogger I found, (admittedly, I didn't search very hard), Why does yahoo not offer a simpler homepage varient?
I'd be more apt to use yahoo (and in fact might be willing to allow it to replace google as yahoo seems to support the newest web trends[save google finance (doh)]) if only I didn't have to look at the god-awful, gaudy homepage that yahoo has. I don't want that many links everywhere. I feel like I'm being assaulted with information and choices. I know what I want when I come to yahoo. What I -don't- want is to be zerged with text. Is there a feature I'm missing, perhaps?

I work on a corporate search engine application as a programmer (using Verity), so I have a keen interest in search technology. I have a question. I was playing around one day and decided to test the various search engines. I decided to search on "bathroom faucet" (assuming one wants to fix the faucet), and unbeleiveably, Yahoo came up with a question at the top of the results asking if I wanted to fix a bathroom faucet. Now how the did they do that? I was very impressed. The next best results came from ask.com, and googles' results were nothing but sites wanting to sell me a bathroom faucet.

First I thought it is a April fools joke that you guys are playing. Now I'm starting to believe that it is real and not a joke. And even changing the blogs also starting to make sense (weird but not weirder than you guys switching companies)
But let me ask you this : Why didn't you guys change the DNS or added a rewrite rule to Apache so that www.mattcutts.com/blog goes to jeremy.zawodny.com/blog and other way around to keep the site look and feel same? I understand you enjoy making your readers crossed-eye but soon no one will be able to read you if we go blind :-)

Joe, Google your Google before you Google. Your Google was totally off Google and doesn't make any Google.

on April 3, 2006 09:32 PM

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